Chapter 27: Insect King

Hot winds swept across the Iron Fir Hills, carrying grit and emitting faint, whining sounds.

Garos slammed the Rock-Breaking Worm heavily onto an open patch of ground, his dragon claw pressing down on its head carapace, forcing the nearly twenty-meter-long giant insect to curl into a ring.

The Rock-Breaking Worm, were it not for the layer of insect carapace covering its body.

With its length and girth, at first glance it resembled a giant serpent rather than an insect.

"Rock-Breaking Worms live underground; burrowing through the earth is an instinctual talent, and they are adept at hiding and ambushing."

"If I can subdue it, I can have the Rock-Breaking Worm steal Black Oil for me."

"No, it cannot even be called stealing; the Black Oil reserves were originally ownerless things. This is winning it through one's own skill."

Garos thought to himself.

The defenses of the Camel Black Oil Field are strict, and there may be some defensive measures underground, but there is more than one oil field on the Sel Wasteland; some smaller oil fields do not have such high defense levels, making the opportunity to obtain Black Oil even greater.

As for Samantha.

Her alchemy cannot be relied upon for now; she has not yet learned to refine and purify Black Oil.

Moreover, even if she could use alchemy to extract Black Oil directly from monsters, the efficiency would not be high enough.

Black Oil itself is the result of monster bodies undergoing special reactions and sedimenting underground over an extremely long period of time.

Unless one's alchemy level is already extremely high, otherwise using alchemy to refine directly would require consuming a vast number of monsters to obtain a small amount of Black Oil, making the effort disproportionate to the gain.

The primary source of Black Oil is still natural reserves.

Purified Black Oil, however, is possible.

Although Garos had never tasted higher-quality Black Oil, he felt that, just like the difference between ordinary metal and Hundred-Refined Steel, the effect of refined Black Oil would certainly be better.

His gaze fell upon the Rock-Breaking Worm.

Garos exhaled a long breath, his claw pressing down hard on the Rock-Breaking Worm's head, preventing it from breaking free of the clamp.

Spell-like Skill — Thought Resonance.

A white gleam lit up in his dragon eyes; Garos immediately closed his eyes and concentrated, extending invisible spiritual energy to touch the Rock-Breaking Worm's head and feel its spirit.

The Thought Resonance skill was something Garos had dug out from his bloodline after much effort previously.

Whether it was luck, or because his purpose and thoughts were very clear, the Adaptation Evolution talent took effect.

Garos did not spend much time before awakening this skill.

It allows the caster to feel the target's emotions while simultaneously letting the target understand the caster's thoughts, enabling a certain degree of communication between the two through the spiritual world.

This gave Garos the possibility of subduing the Rock-Breaking Worm.

For fierce beasts like the Rock-Breaking Worm, whose intelligence is low and communication difficult, only a skill similar to Thought Resonance can facilitate communication.

Due to the gap in spiritual strength between the two sides, Thought Resonance was successfully cast upon the Rock-Breaking Worm.

In Garos's perception, hunger, destructive urges, and other primal impulses surged forth first, followed by fragmented memories: the salty fishiness of gnawing on a Goblin corpse while eating ore veins, the excitement of mating with other Rock-Breaking Worms, and the fear of being lifted into the sky by a dragon-type creature, detached from the earth.

The Rock-Breaking Worm's consciousness was dim and confused.

A dragon-shaped light shadow, representing Garos's spiritual will, appeared in its spiritual world.

Garos looked around and found the Rock-Breaking Worm's spiritual world exceptionally dark, like a pitch-black, lightless underground; the Worm's will-body was curled up in a pit.

"Submit to me, and I can let you live, granting you food."

Garos's voice rang out in its spiritual world in a way it could perceive and understand.

"Oh."

The Rock-Breaking Worm's reaction was flat, as if life and food were unimportant.

Recalling its previous points of excitement, Garos pondered for a moment and said, "Submit to me, and I grant you infinite opportunities to mate with other Rock-Breaking Worms."

As expected.

The Rock-Breaking Worm's emotions suddenly surged.

It seemed that, for it, this was the most important and sacred thing in insect life, even higher than life itself.

"I, am, willing."

It replied in broken fragments.

Excellent, I didn't expect it to be so simple.

Garos felt a surge of joy within.

Although communication through Thought Resonance is not enslavement, given the Worm's intelligence, it has no concept of deception; as long as Garos can provide what it wants, it will remain loyal to its own instincts and serve Garos.

This is more like a mutually beneficial arrangement.

A transaction where each takes what they need.

Just then.

Something unexpected happened to Garos.

Crack, crack, crack. The underground-like spiritual world suddenly trembled, and the Rock-Breaking Worm's consciousness became filled with awe, respect, and fear.

"What is happening?"

Garos asked.

"The King, has, come."

The Rock-Breaking Worm replied painfully.

At the same time, its will-body began to tremble, cracks appearing one after another on its surface; immediately, it shattered into pieces, and a much smaller worm, yet with a more condensed and lifelike image, as if it were a physical entity, drilled out.

It had no eyes.

But Garos could feel that it seemed to be staring coldly at him.

At this moment, the entire spiritual world of the Rock-Breaking Worm began to collapse, and the small worm gradually became transparent, slowly disappearing.

Garos opened his eyes again.

The Rock-Breaking Worm before him twitched a few times, then stopped moving, as if it had become a soulless shell; it had no fatal wounds on its body, yet it was already dead.

"It seems not simple to tame the Rock-Breaking Worms."

Garos sighed, but he did not lose heart; in an instant, he perked up again.

This world does not revolve around him; encountering setbacks is only natural. The key lies in overcoming difficulties, making flowers bloom from thorns, and filling rough paths with smooth roads.

"The small worm that appeared last when the King came must be the Worm King."

"Can it directly decide the life and death of the worms under its command and destroy their spirits?"

Garos remembered the Worm King he had seen back then: its carapace shimmered with a cold, metallic luster under the sunlight, its body length of about a hundred meters was terrifying, and its life level was at least above Level 12.

Level 12; a Red Dragon would need to be around 40 years old to reach such a life level, while an Iron Dragon would need to be over 50 years old.

That is to say.

The Worm King's life level is at least equivalent to a young dragon, something Garos cannot deal with at present.

"Strange, the inheritance never mentioned that the Rock-Breaking Worm King possesses such a mental control method."

"Perhaps it has undergone some mutation, acquiring skills different from ordinary Worm Kings."

Garos pondered in his heart.

Next, he went to the abandoned mine once more, using tamed beasts from the past as bait to draw out ordinary Rock-Breaking Worms, then capturing them alive, and repeating the process to apply Mind Sense on them in an attempt to tame them.

The result was the same; the Worm King interfered once again.

This made Garos realize that unless he could deal with the Worm King, with his current means, he had no way to tame the Rock-Breaking Worms to work for him.

"You ruined my good deed; just you wait."

Garos made a mental note of the obstructive Worm King.

Sooner or later, he would catch it and make it dig mines and extract oil for him every day until it died of exhaustion.

As the saying goes, heaven never seals off all exits for a dragon; if one wants to do anything, one can always think of other ways. This group of Rock-Breaking Worms is difficult to tame, but Garos has other targets.

(End of this chapter)